The East Bay shoreline is strung like a necklace with more than a dozen parks, from the bluffs of Point Pinole near Richmond to the sandy beach and shallow waters of Alameda’s Crown Beach to the salt marshes near Coyote Hills. The place where water meets land is a magnet for life of many kinds, and these parks are no exception: recreational destination for joggers, swimmers, and windsurfers; home for leopard sharks, bat rays, and crabs; wintertime smorgasbord for thousands of shorebirds. Turn back the clock a few decades, and you would have found garbage dumps or dynamite factories here. Skip back a few more decades, and you would find thriving aquatic ecosystems. You can still see traces of all of this and more at the shoreline parks of the East Bay Regional Park District.

On summer weekends, the nearly 4,000 picnic tables of the East Bay Regional Park District are packed with families from many of the Bay Area's diverse communities, returning year after year to their favorite spots, along with great blue herons hunting gophers, crows and ravens pillaging trash cans, and raccoons swiping meat right off the grill. All just part of the curious ecology of our local picnic areas.